Subscribe

Author: Mario Behling

The FOSSASIA Summit 2018 takes place in Singapore from Thursday, March 22 – Sunday, March 25. Open Source contributors can now apply for a free ticket to the event, and accommodation throughout the conference. In addition, you’ll be eligible to participate in: Featured cloud workshops, the UNESCO hackathon, and celebrate the 20th Anniversary of the Open Source Initiative. All you have to do is convince us, that you are an awesome Open Source contributor and book your trip to Singapore!

About #OpenTechNights

Developers from all over the world are joining the FOSSASIA Summit. We want to connect established and new Open Tech contributors alike. With the support of UNESCO, the Open Source Initiative, and other partners, we are inviting Free and Open Source Software contributors to join us. Winners will receive free lodging at a shared accommodation in the centre of Singapore, and a free ticket to the conference.

Winners are expected to join the summit each day, to participate in the workshops, and the Hackathon on Saturday/Sunday, March 24/25. We would also hope you can support the Open Source Initiative at their booth.

How do I sign up?

Step 2: We will notify all winners within three days of their submission, however judging will begin immediately, and continue until all open spots are filled, so the earlier you apply, the higher your chances to win. Please note, winners will receive free accommodations in Singapore. Flight and other travel costs are not included and are the responsibility of the attendee.

Step 3: Selected applicants must confirm their itinerary and tickets before March 1st to insure their free stay in Singapore. Earliest check-in possible is Wednesday March 21, latest check-out is Monday, March 26. Please indicate your arrival and departure times in the application form.

Expectations of Participants – Share what you learn

Attendees support volunteers, speakers and participants at the event, and take a shift at the Open Source Initiative’s booth. Let’s bring the spirit of sharing Open Technologies and learning together!

Please confirm your participation at the opening event at 12PM, Thursday, March 22, 2018 and participate in the specially featured cloud workshops on Friday, March 23, 2018 from 9.00 AM – 5.00PM.

Attendees participate in the UNESCO Hackathon on Saturday, March 24 (2.00 PM – 10.00PM) and on Sunday, March 25 (9.00 AM – 5.00PM).

Attendees help reach out to community members who cannot join us at the event, make tweets, share what you learn on social media, publish photos and put up blog post about the summit.

Today we are very proud to announce our Grand Prize Winners and Finalist Winners of Codeheat 2017/2018.

Codeheat was epic in every regard. Participants not only solved a massive amount of issues in FOSSASIA’s projects, reviewed pull requests, shared scrums, and wrote blog posts, but most importantly they encouraged and helped one another to learn and progress along the way. It was a very, very busy 5 months for everyone – we had 647 developers from 13 countries participating in the contest supported by 43 mentors. Thank you all for this amazing achievement!

With so much excellent work getting done, it was a super hard to choose the Grand Prize and Finalist Winners of the contest. Our winners stand out in particular as they contributed to FOSSASIA projects on a continuously high level following our Free and Open Source Best Practices. They worked in different areas – code, reviews, blog posts and supported other community members.

Each of the Grand Prize Winners is awarded a travel grant to join us at the FOSSASIA Summit in Singapore from March 22-25, 2018 where they receive the official Codeheat award, and meet with mentors and FOSSASIA developers. Other Finalist Winners will receive travel support vouchers to go to a Free and Open Source Software event of their choice. Active participants will also receive a certificate over the upcoming weeks. FOSSASIA mentors will meet many contributors and hand out prizes and Tshirts at our regular meetups and events across Asia.

Congratulations to our Grand Prize Winners, Finalist Winners, and all of the participants who spent the last few of months learning, sharing and contributing to Free and Open Source Projects. Well-done! We are deeply impressed by your work, your progress and advancement. The winners are (in alphabetical order):

Grand Prize Winners

Finalist Winners

About Codeheat

Codeheat is a contest that the FOSSASIA organization is honored to run every year. We saw immense growth this year in participants and the depth of contributions.

Thank you Mentors and Supporters

Our 40+ mentors and many project developers, the heart and soul of Codeheat, are the reason the contest thrives. Mentors volunteer their time to help participants become open source contributors. Mentors spend hundreds of hours during answering questions, reviewing submitted code, and welcoming the new developers to project. Codeheat would not be possible without their patience and tireless efforts. Learn more about this year’s mentors on the Codeheat website.

Certificate of Participation

Participating developers, mentors and the FOSSASIA admin team learnt so much and it was an amazing and enriching experience and we believe the learnings are the main take-away of the program. We hope to see everyone continuing their contributions, sharing what they have learnt with others and to seize the opportunity to develop their code profile with FOSSASIA. We want to work together with the Open Tech community to improve people’s lives and create a better world for all. As a participating developer or mentor, you will receive your certificate over the upcoming weeks. Thank you!

FOSSASIA teams up with Science Centre Singapore and Lifelong Learning Institute for Asia’s premier open technology summit. The FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit is taking place from March 22-25, 2018 under the tagline “The Open Conversational Web” with a strong focus on Artificial Intelligence and Cloud for the Industry 4.0. More than 200 speakers will fly in to present at the event. International exhibitors will showcase their latest advancements and meet developers in a careers fair.

The FOSSASIA Open Tech Summit is an annual tech event featuring tech icons from around the world since 2009. The event is all about the latest and greatest open source technologies and their impact and applications on business and society. With more than 3,000 attendees the FOSSASIA Summit is the biggest gathering of Open Source developers and businesses in Asia. A great feature of 2018 is the expanded exhibition space where tech businesses, SMEs and startups converge with developers and customers and meet potential candidates in a careers fair.

“The goal of the FOSSASIA Summit is to bring together developers, technologists and businesses to collaborate, share and explore the full potential of open source to create opportunities for new industries. And, right now there is a shift happening where users increasingly communicate through their voice with computer applications enhanced by Open Source AI technologies.“, says Ms. Hong Phuc Dang, chair of the summit and continues: “We expect to see interesting new voice gadgets to try out at the event. And, attendees will be able to learn how to develop solutions for these new voice interface devices here.”

Associate Professor Lim Tit Meng, CE of Science Centre adds: “Technologies like Big Data, AI and VR, and the web itself are becoming more open and conversational. They are also the engines behind the Industry 4.0 innovations. The open source community, with its spirit of co-creation and sharing is at the forefront of conversations on the web. At Science Centre Singapore, we aim to showcase and create content using these technologies and look forward to learning from and working with the open source community.”

The call for speakers is open and “we are seeing a large increase in proposals this year” says Mr. Mario Behling from the FOSSASIA Summit committee. Speakers are expected from companies such as car manufacturer Daimler, tech companies like Google, Microsoft, Oracle, Samsung, Intel and from many Singapore startups with topics ranging from algorithms and cognitive experts to DevOps, cloud containers, Blockchain and Neurotechnologies. Voice assistants and Open Source development solutions for SUSI.AI, Amazon Alexa, Google Assistant, Microsoft Cortana, Siri, and solutions using Nuance or IBM Watson are a big topic.

During four days developers, technologists, scientists, and entrepreneurs convene to collaborate, share information and learn about the latest in open technologies, including Artificial Intelligence software, DevOps, Cloud Computing, Linux, Science, Hardware and more. The theme of this year’s event is “Towards the Open Conversational Web“.

For our feature event we are looking for speaker submissions about Open Source for the following areas:

There will be special events celebrating the 20th anniversary of the Open Source Initiative and its impact in Open Source business. An exhibition space is available for company and project stands.

Submission Guidelines

Please propose your session as early as possible and include a description of your session proposal that is as complete as possible. The description is of particular importance for the selection. Once accepted, speakers will receive a code for a speakers ticket. Speakers will receive a free speakers ticket and two standard tickets for their partner or friends. Sessions are accepted on an ongoing basis.

Dates & Deadlines

Late submissions: Later submissions are possible, but early submissions have priority

Notification of acceptance: On an ongoing basis

Schedule Announced: January 20, 2018

FOSSASIA Open Tech Summit: March 22nd – 25th, 2018

Sessions and Tracks

Talks and Workshops

Talk slots are 20 minutes long plus 5-10 minutes for questions and answers. The idea is, that participants will use the sessions to get an idea of the work of others and are able to follow up in more detail in break-out areas, where they discuss more and start to work together. Speakers can also sign up for either a 1-hour long or a 2-hours workshop sessions. Longer sessions are possible in principle. Please tell us the proposed length of your session at the time of submission.

Lightning talks

You have some interesting ideas but do not want to submit a full talk? We suggest you go for a lightning talk which is a 5 minutes slot to present your idea or project. You are welcome to continue the discussion in breakout areas. There are tables and chairs to serve your get-togethers.

Stands and assemblies

We offer spaces in our exhibition area for companies, projects, installations, team gatherings and other fun activities. We are curious to know what you would like to make, bring or show. Please add details in the submission form.

Developer Rooms/Track Hosts

Get in touch early if you plan to organize a developer room at the event. FOSSASIA is also looking for team members who are interested to co-host and moderate tracks. Please sign up to become a host here.

Publication

Audio and video recordings of the lectures will be published in various formats under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0) license. This license allows commercial use by media institutions as part of their reporting. If you do not wish for material from your lecture to be published or streamed, please let us know in your submission.

Sponsorship & Contact

If you would like to sponsor FOSSASIA or have any questions, please contact us via [email protected].

Codeheat is a coding contest for developers interested in contributing to Open Source software and hardware projects at FOSSASIA. Join development of real world software applications, build up your developer profile, learn new new coding skills, collaborate with the community and make new friends from around the world! Sign up for #CodeHeat here now and follow Codeheat on Twitter.

The contest runs until 1st February 2018. All FOSSASIA projects take part in Codeheat including:

Grand prize winners will be invited to present their work at the FOSSASIA OpenTechSummit in Singapore from March 23rd -25th 2018 and will get 600 SGD in travel funding to attend, plus a free speaker ticket and beautiful Swag.

Our jury will choose three winners from the top 10 contributors according to code quality and relevance of commits for the project. The jury also takes other contributions like submitted weekly scrum reports and monthly technical blog posts into account, but of course awesome code is the most important item on the list.

Other participants will have the chance to win Tshirts, Swag and vouchers to attend Open Tech events in the region and will get certificates of participation.

Team mentors and jury members from 10 different countries support participants of the contest.

Participants should take the time to read through the contest FAQ and familiarize themselves with the introductory information and Readme.md of each project before starting to work on an issue.

Developers interested in the contest can also contact mentors through project channels on the FOSSASIA gitter.

I would request you to please guide me as to how can I collaborate with you and also how can I contribute effectively to the organization.

At times I might get up to 20 private mails per day about “How to contribute to Open Source”. Usually I will direct developers to our mailing list or chat channels if they are asking about a specific project. But, how do contributions work at FOSSASIA? How can new developers join projects effectively? We have tried many different ways and spent a lot of time communicating with newcomers, many of them new to Git and Open Source development.

Over the years we have gotten better at helping new developers, designers and other contributors to join up. We have more than 1300 registered developers in our GitHub organization today. Not all of them can contribute every day, but we do have thousands of commits every year.

So, how are we able to scale up? I believe one reason are our Best Practices. We didn’t have a document “FOSSASIA Best Practices” yet, but in our daily work we have established excellent (mostly unwritten) best practices, that I would like to share in a concise form here now as a reference for new developers.

Happy to get your feedback and comments.

Development Best Practices at FOSSASIA

Culture and Communication

Please adapt your language to non-native English speakers and be super friendly. Remember we are an international community with contributors mainly from Asia and Europe. We are not used to swearing and will mostly understand words literally. At all times ensure your tone stays appropriate and friendly in the FOSSASIA community.

Stay modest. Sometimes newcomers already have an amazing knowledge in some areas. Still remember, it is no reason to be arrogant. Even the best developer does not know everything.

Be nice and welcoming. Why not add “please” in an issue or a comment “Thank you” in a pull request if someone did a good job? Show your appreciation for the good work of your co-developers.

If you are involved in a topic you don’t understand yet, try to learn yourself as much as possible from public channels (wikipedia, stackoverflow) but also do not hesitate to ask questions to other developers.

Communication Channels

Every project at FOSSASIA has its own channels. Many projects use Gitter, some Slack or IRC. Usually you will find information of the main communication channels of a project in the Readme.md.

While we are a community of Open Source and Free Software developers we still reserve our right to use whatever tools we deem necessary to help us to achieve our goal of developing the best possible Open Technologies – software and hardware. It is one step at a time 🙂

Private and Public Chat or Issue Tracker

Chat is a great way to connect with other contributors, but not all contributors are there all the time (consider time difference and personal schedules) and they are not always available to chat. Chat tends to be unstructured and with lots of people in a room there are often a number of threads. Therefore chat is great for help on setup issues and things where you got stuck.

Do not use chat for feature requests and detailed discussions on issues. These things are best for the issue tracker, where people from different timezones can join and where a focused conversation on one specific topic can happen.

Some people try to overcome the unstructured chats by switching to private communication. This shuts out other contributors who might have similar issues. A result I often observed is also, that contributors will bring up arguments in discussions like “I have discussed this already with xyz privately and he agrees”. Other contributors have not seen this discussion if it has not been taken place in public and we haven’t seen the arguments. We don’t know if xyz really agrees or if it was misunderstood. Private conversations are not transparent. Surely, there are cases where private chat is needed, e.g. for specific deployment questions of projects, but whenever you talk about development, please switch to public chat or open an issue.

Feature Requests and Bug Reports

Some newcomers are not accustomed to issue trackers and might try to inform developers on the mailing list, chat or even write private emails about bugs and features, but the right place to do this is: The issue tracker of a project.

Any bug or feature, please open an issue in the issue tracker right away and indicate if you want to work on it yourself.

Please include all relevant information when you submit an issue and wherever possible a link, information about the code that has issues and a screenshot.

When you file a bug report on the issue tracker, make sure you add steps to reproduce it. Especially if that bug is some weird/rare one.

Join Development

Before you join development, please set up the project on your local machine, run it and go through the application completely. Press on any button you can find and see where it leads to. Explore. (Don’t worry. Nothing will happen to the app or to you due to the exploring. Only thing that will happen is, you’ll be more familiar with what is where and might even get some cool ideas on how to improve various aspects of the app.).

If you would like to work on an issue, drop in a comment at the issue. If it is already assigned to someone, but there is no sign of any work being done, please free to drop in a comment so that the issue can be assigned to you if the previous assignee has dropped it entirely.

Commits/Pull Requests

All pull requests need to be associated to an issue.

All PRs need to be assigned to the person working on it.

If an issue cannot be completed in less than a day, it should be broken up into multiple issues.

Make pull requests from your own forks (even if you have write rights to the repository, do not create new branches, develop on your own branches).

State the actual change or enhancement in the commit message of PRs (do not just state “Fixes issue #123”).

Add the issue number into the description (this helps to speed up reviews as reviewers can simply click to get more info in the issue itself).

When you make very minor changes to a pull request of yours (like for example fixing a failing travis build or some small style corrections or minor changes requested by reviewers) make sure you squash your commits afterwards so that you don’t have an absurd number of commits for a very small fix (Learn how to squash at https://davidwalsh.name/squash-commits-git).

Add a screenshot if you changed anything in the UI of a project. When you’re submitting a pull request for a UI-related issue, please add a screenshot of your change or a link to a deployment where it can be tested out along with your pull request. It makes it much easier for the reviewers and helps to speed up the process. You’ll also get reviews quicker.

Add a link to your deployment of the project, where reviewers can check out what you have changed (especially for smaller changes this is very helpful as the reviewer might not even need to set up the system itself and test it. Again this speeds up the review process a lot).

Always ensure CI and tests are successful.

Help to resolve merge conflicts (especially if there are several PRs at the same time, merge conflicts are common. Help the reviewers and solve merge conflicts to speed up the process.).

Merging Pull Requests should only happen if at least two contributors reviewed the PR and approved it.

Scope of Issues and Commits

Stay focused on the issue and its specifics: Sometimes it is tempting to do more changes in a pull request and simply add a nice little feature after mentioning it in the issue tracker. Please do not do this. Contributors will look at the title of issues usually to check if it is relevant for them. For example, if an issue is about changing a font, do not also change the color even if this seems like small change to you. Many projects have a design template and standard colors etc. that they want to achieve. So your changes might need to be discussed in a bigger setting even if they seem small to you. Same applies to many other areas.

Do only the changes in a pull request that are mentioned in the issue. Do not change anything else without ever mentioning it (remember match issues with pull requests).

Branch Policies

Most FOSSASIA Projects have:

a development branch (which is the working branch. Please commit to this branch.) and

Getting Started

Newcomers are sometimes afraid to make a pull request. Don’t be! It is the responsibility of reviewers to review them. And Git is a beautiful tool when it comes to reverting pull requests with errors.

In simple issues keep it simple and “simply” contribute, e.g. in an issue “change the color of the button from green to red”, there is no need to mention and ask “here is a screenshot where I changed the color to red. Should I make a PR now?”. Just make the pull request and wait for the feedback of the reviewer.

Take on responsibility early and help to review other contributions. Even though you do not have write access in a repository you can already help to review other commits.

Documentation

Please ensure you provide information about your code and the functioning of your app as part of every code contribution.

Add information on technologies and the code into the code itself and into documentation files e.g. into the Readme.md or /docs folder. Documentation is not a thing that should be done at the end after a few weeks or months of coding! Documentation is a continuous effort at every step of software development.

If you add new libraries or technologies add information about them into the Readme file.

If you implement a different design or change the css in a web project, please add information to the design specifications/template. If there are not any design specifications in the project yet, why not start them and add a section into the Readme.md to start with?

Always help to keep documentation up to date and make it easy for new contributors to join the project.

Thank you for helping to define many of the practices while working on the Open Event project to the developer team and for additional input and links to Niranjan Rajendran.

The contest runs until 3rd February 2017. Grand prize winners will be invited to present their work at the FOSSASIA Summit at the Science Centre Singapore from March 17th -19th 2017 and will get up to 450 USD in travel funding to attend, plus a free speaker ticket.

Our jury will choose three winners from the top 10 contributors according to code quality and relevance of commits for the project. The jury also takes other contributions like submitted scrum reports and technical blog posts into account, but of course awesome code is the most important item on the list. Other participants will have the chance to win vouchers to attend Open Tech events in the region and will get certificates of participation. Sign up here now.

A team of over 30 mentors and jury members from 10 different countries supports participants of the contest.

Participants should take the time to read through the contest FAQ and familiarize themselves with the introductory information and Readme.md of each project before starting work on an issue.

After the successful Google Summer of Code we are very happy and honored to participate for the second year in Google Code-In. The contest introduces pre-university students (ages 13-17) to open source software development and runs from December 7 2015 until January 25, 2016. Learn more here.

Because Google Code-in is often the first experience many students have with open source, the contest is designed to make it easy for students to jump right in. Open source organizations chosen by Google provide a list of tasks for students to work on during the seven week contest period. A unique part of the contest is that each task has mentors from the organization assigned should students have questions or need help along the way.

We often get the question, how can I join the community. There is no official membership form to fill out in order to participate in the Open Tech Community. You simply start to contribute to our projects on GitHub and you are already a member. So, let’s work together to develop to develop social software for everyone!

The FOSSASIA team welcomes contributors and supporters to Free and Open Source Software. Become a developer, a documentation writer, packaging maintainer, tester, user supporter, blogger or organize events and meetups about our projects.

Women in IT discussion in the community

Here are some ideas how we can collaborate

Download our Open Source applications, install them and use them

The first step of joining a project is always to download the software and try it out. The best motivation to support a project is, if the project is useful for yourself. Check out our many projects on github.com/fossasia and our project social media Open Source search engine on github.com/loklak.

Show your support and ★star FOSSASIA projects

Help to motivate existing contributors and show your support of FOSSASIA projects on GitHub. Star projects and fork them. Doing something that people like and that helps people is a great motivation for many.

Learn about best practices

We have formulated best practices for contributing to Open Source to help new contributors to get started. Please read them carefully. Understanding our best practices will help you to collaborate with the community and ensure your code gets merged more quickly.

Subscribe to news

Subscribe to the FOSSASIA Newsletter to stay up to date on new software releases, events and coding programs here on the main page.

Join and support the FOSSASIA network at community events

Set up a booth or a table about FOSSASIA at Open Source community events! There are many events of the open source community all over the world. The core team of FOSSASIA is simply not able to attend all events. You can support the cause by making the project visible. Register as a member of the FOSSASIA community at events, set up an info point and showcase Free and Open Source projects. Check out for example our meetup group in Singapore: meetup.com/FOSSASIA-Singapore-Open-Technology-Meetup/

Translate our projects and their documentation

Do you speak more than one language? Most Open Tech projects are 100% volunteer translated, which means you can be part of a translation team translating software and documentation thousands of people will use. Start now and check out our GitHub repository.